In redeveloped Rio, the Games aren’t always Olympian

It’s less than 500 days to the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, but if the city learned lessons from the 2014 World Cup experience, it’s the speculators who are profiting, not the citizens.

A forty-minute crawl through viscous traffic, the bus station rather than the beach is where it’s best to understand Rio de Janeiro. There are no cameras and crews jostling for obvious backdrops for their Olympic stories, no poodles in replica Jimmy Choos or stereotypical girls strutting Dolce & Gabbana bikinis either.

But there is a sense of what makes the city tick while losing several minutes a day on many modern values. Constructed as a temporary solution in the middle of the last century and never replaced, it’s barren, surrounded by motorways and a desolate piece of port.